London has been battered by 50mph winds that have felled trees and caused travel chaos. Powerful gusts swept across the capital as the Met Office issued a yellow "be aware" weather alert for most of the country.

The boyfriend of the late Amy Winehouse was hoping to have a relationship with a woman he is accused of raping twice as she slept, a court heard today.

Reg Traviss, 35, who denies two counts of rape, told Southwark crown court: “There is no truth in this allegation whatsoever.”

Traviss said he and his 27-year-old accuser got drunk together at three central London bars, then they had consensual sex at his Marylebone flat in the early hours of New Year’s Eve. She invited him to bed, he said.

The film director, who was dating Winehouse when she died in July last year, told the jury today he didn’t go out “whatsoever” for several months after the tragedy, and that his alleged victim instigated sex and made no objections.

The next day he repaid the woman £25 she had spent on drinks the night before, walked her halfway to the Tube, kissed her goodbye and agreed plans to meet up again that night, he said.

Asked by his QC, Ian Winter, if he thought he and the woman could have a relationship, he said: “I sort of came away from that evening thinking, this could be really good, this could be the start of something. I wasn’t looking for a girlfriend but she is somebody I have known for a long time.”

He said that when he did not hear back from her weeks later, after she had gone to meet a man in New York, “I thought, it’s a pity, and that she had got together with somebody else or just blown me out, it’s a pity.

“I thought we would meet up again and be friends after a certain time had elapsed and just go back to being friends.”

Traviss said he was shocked when police contacted him in April to inform him about the sex allegation against him.